Sunday, July 31, 2016

It's been almost a decade since the American real estate market collapsed, triggering a world wide recession. Unfortunately, we tend to track the United States -- with about a ten year lag. And now, Alan Freeman writes, the Canadian real estate bubble is about to burst:

For years, this bubble has been carefully nurtured by governments
desperate for economic growth, realtors who will do anything for a sale
and financial institutions happy to plow billions into housing, knowing
Ottawa would always backstop their losses.

And as more and more people, particularly in Vancouver and Toronto,
find themselves shut out of the housing market, those who had the good
fortune to get in early sit in self-satisfied silence, content in the
knowledge that their modest bungalows have turned them into millionaires
— on paper, at least.

As was the case in the United States, people who look at the data straight on can see the storm that is coming:

The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. (CMHC) reported this week growing signs of “problematic conditions”
in the housing market, particularly in Vancouver and Toronto, where
there is “a combination of price acceleration and over-valuation.” An
overheated price climate was a problem in nine cities; over-building was
a problem in seven.

“CMHC assesses that there is now strong evidence of overvaluation
across Canada: house prices across Canada remain higher than levels
consistent with personal disposable income, population growth and other
fundamental factors,” the agency said. In other words, there’s no
rational reason justifying current prices.

The Office of Superintendent of Financial Institutions (OSFI) has an
even grimmer assessment of the situation. It has imposed harsher
criteria on stress tests for smaller lenders, forcing them to evaluate
how their balance sheets would be affected by a decline of at least 50
per cent in house values for Greater Vancouver and at least 40 per cent
for Greater Toronto.

The problem is that governments have encouraged people who don't have the capital to buy homes. And those who have capital to burn -- particularly in Vancouver -- have made home ownership unaffordable.

Saturday, July 30, 2016

Hillary Clinton has the Democratic nomination for president. Now the hard part begins. She'll have to climb a mountain. A substantial number of Americans see her as the status quo in an election where the majority of them are clamouring for change. Tom Walkom writes:

When U.S. President Barack Obama called the
former senator and secretary of state the most qualified presidential
candidate ever, he wasn’t far off.

When he
noted on Wednesday night she was more qualified than both he and former
president Bill Clinton had been when they first took office, he was
absolutely correct. Compared to Hillary Clinton today, both men then
were callow newcomers.

But it’s worth noting that both Obama and Bill Clinton won. And they won in large part because they were new.

Victor Hugo wrote that there is nothing so powerful as an idea whose time has come. If Americans think that Hillary's time has passed, she'll loose -- even if Donald Trump is a very bad idea. That's why the theme floating through Bill Clinton's biography of his wife was that she was the "best darned change maker" he knew:

Bill Clinton understands the problem, which is
why in his speech to the convention Tuesday night he insisted on
referring to his wife as a “change-maker.”

In
particular, he cited her role in passing a law to provide health
insurance to poor children and her ability to winkle out federal funds
for New York City after 9-11. He pointedly didn’t talk about her failure
to get a more generalized health insurance reform though Congress.

Hillary's mountain isn't Everest. It's more like the Matterhorn. It can be scaled by a skilled politician. Donald Trump's approach to mountain climbing appears to be, if you generate enough hot hair, you can soar to the top.

So Hillary's task will be twofold. As she scales the mountain, she'll have to puncture Trump's balloon.

Friday, July 29, 2016

Economists are obsessed with growth. Unfortunately, Jim Stanford writes, they define the term much too narrowly -- because they assume that good growth is inextricably linked to profit. Progressives should be fighting this idea. Growth means much more than profit. It really means "work:"

"Growth" has to be correctly defined and measured, and we must
always be crystal clear that lifting living, social and environmental
standards -- not "growth" for its own sake -- is our goal. In this
context, I prefer to discuss "work" rather than "growth," since after
all human productive activity ("work," broadly defined) is the only
thing that adds value to the natural resources we harvest (hopefully in a
sustainable fashion) from the environment. It is obvious that there is
plenty of work to be done out there (caring for ourselves, our
communities and the environment), and millions of underutilized people
with the desire and ability to do it.

There is so much work to do. And that work is important for reasons other than profit:

In terms of its impact on living standards, the effects of growth
depend totally on how new GDP is produced and what it is used for. If
higher GDP is associated with higher profit margins, which in turn are
accumulated in undistributed corporate cash hoards or paid out in fat
dividends to well-off investors, then growth may accomplish nothing. And
if higher GDP is generated through extensive resource exploitation,
sucking more value out of a non-renewable resource base and ignoring the
need for conservation and amelioration, then it will certainly be
associated with continued environmental degradation.

On the other hand, there are many other ways in which an economy can
"grow," and a country's real GDP increase. It could happen, for example,
through a major expansion in human services delivery (e.g., child care,
elder care, education and culture). Proper programs in these areas
would create hundreds of thousands of new jobs, tens of billions of
dollars in new incomes, and many billions in revenues for government --
not to mention delivering services that are valuable and life-enhancing
in their own regard. GDP might also grow because of huge investments in
public capital and physical infrastructure -- things like utilities,
affordable housing, education and cultural facilities, and parks.

For nearly fifty years now, the world economy has been operating on a narrow definition of growth.The benefits of that narrowly defined growth have gone mainly to those at the top of the economic pyramid. The powers that be have told us that growth, so defined, is a scientific law -- like Newton's Law of Gravity.

Put simply, that's hogwash. And, in the places most devoted to that narrow conception of growth -- like the U.S. and the UK -- the natives are getting restless.

Thursday, July 28, 2016

Bernie Sanders' revolution has had a profound effect on the Democratic Party. Once upon a time, that party didn't cower to Wall Street. Linda McQuaig writes:

In the midst of the 1930s Depression,
Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt showed backbone, championing
unions, bringing in universal pensions, taxing the rich and restraining
Wall Street with the Glass-Steagall Act. Addressing a wildly cheering
crowd at Madison Square Gardens in 1936, Roosevelt vowed to defy the
enraged bankers and financial tycoons lined up against him. “They are
unanimous in their hate for me — and I welcome their hatred!”

Roosevelt’s
New Deal ushered in a postwar era in which workers made impressive
economic gains as a rising middle class while the wealthy elite lost
ground.

But, beginning in the 1970's, the party lost its nerve:

Indeed, the Democratic Party had soon
virtually abandoned working people, realigning itself with Wall Street
and voting with Republicans for financial deregulation and dramatically
lower taxes on the rich.

Republicans
sided with Schwarzman and other angry billionaires. Even though the
Democrats initially had control of the White House and both houses of
Congress, they capitulated, thereby maintaining a tax loophole that
delivers billions of dollars in tax savings to some of the least needy
people on the planet.

Not content to
protect their own tax breaks, the Wall Street barons, including American
Express CEO Harvey Golub, went on the offensive, demanding an end to
tax breaks that helped low-income Americans — a group dubbed “lucky
duckies” by the Wall Street Journal for their low-tax status.

And then came Bernie -- who calls himself a socialist, but who really is a New Dealer. He and his folks are not going away:

The youthful Sanders crowd, which threatened to derail the convention on
opening day, isn’t likely to go away. It’s determined to shape the
Democratic Party of the future, believing that the only way to respond
to the class war being waged by an aggressive billionaire class is with
backbone — a body part that’s been noticeably missing from Democrats in
recent decades.

Hillary owes Bernie big time. If she's wise, she'll give him a prominent position in her administration. As LBJ once said of J. Edgar Hoover, it's better to have him "inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in."

Wednesday, July 27, 2016

The Chilcot Report has been made public. Yet Tony Blair And George W. -- who claimed to stand for truth, justice and the American Way -- are enjoying their retirements. Gerry Caplan writes:

The invasion of Iraq never was about
Saddam or his fictional weapons of mass destruction. Saddam had nothing
whatever to do with 9/11 or al-Qaeda and had no WMDs. Look, if I knew
that, how could Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair not have known?

What
did they want, those two BFFs? Mr. Bush, Vice-President Dick Cheney and
the neocons, as far as anyone can figure, mostly wanted to show the
world that America could not be disrespected by a two-bit Middle East
despot like Saddam. That refusal to abide America being humiliated was
at the very heart of neoconservatism. For his part, Mr. Blair was
consumed with being America’s most faithful lapdog. He needed Mr. Bush
to know he could always be counted on, no questions asked. “I will be
with you, whatever,” Mr. Blair wrote Mr. Bush.

In their names, crimes were committed:

In the hierarchy of the world’s
international crimes, the top three are genocide, crimes against
humanity and war crimes. It’s hardly in question that the Americans and
British committed war crimes and crimes against humanity in Iraq. So
what penalties are their leaders paying?

Why,
the same penalty all Western leaders pay for their villainy. As Henry
Kissinger did for his many crimes against humanity, from Chile to
Indonesia to Bangladesh. He’s now a mentor on world affairs to Hillary
Clinton – the non-reckless presidential candidate. Or Ronald Reagan, who
backed sadistic terrorist groups across Central America and worked
closely with the apartheid regime in South Africa. He’s now totally
mythologized, the revered hero of the Republican Party.

Bush and Blair will never see the interior of the International Criminal Court. But they're hoping to enter the Halls of Mythology.

Tuesday, July 26, 2016

Sometimes silence isn't golden. June 21st marked the anniversary of the passage of Bill C-51. When Justin Trudeau's party voted to pass the bill, they did so saying they would change it substantially once they were elected. Michael Harris writes:

C-51 handed Canada’s spy service grotesque
new powers that are unconstitutional, indefensible and unnecessary.
Short of killing or sexually assaulting ‘persons of interest’ in its
quest to disrupt activities deemed to be ‘dangerous’ to national
security, CSIS was handed carte blanche by the Harper
government. Not a good situation when, at the time, Canada — unlike the
United States, Great Britain, Australia and New Zealand — had no
parliamentary oversight of the activities of the country’s spies.

As far as civilian oversight went, Harper starved the Security and
Intelligence Review Committee of funding and never even bothered to fill
a vacancy (the committee only has five members to begin with). Harper
didn’t want oversight — he wanted a rubber stamp and zombie
appointees. And if Arthur Porter hadn’t been accused in a kickback
scheme in a Montreal hospital project, Harper’s personal choice to head
up SIRC would have continued his oversight of SIRC. (As it happened, he
died a fugitive from Canadian justice in a Panamanian jail.)

More importantly, the bill bore the marks of the Harperites' utter contempt for the Charter of Rights and Freedoms:

Basic civil rights went on the chopping block when the bill received
Royal Assent in June 2015. The spy service could infringe on free speech
because “promoting” terrorism was now a jailing offence. CSIS could
make more arrests without warrants, even in cases where all the
authorities had was the suspicion that an individual “may” carry out a
terrorist act. The spy agency was no longer restricted to simply
gathering intelligence, but now had the power to “disrupt” suspected
terror plots. CSIS could even siphon personal information about an
individual from 100 government departments, including the Canada Revenue
Agency and Health Canada. And if the spooks planned to break the law or
violate the Constitution, they could go before a judge in secret to get
pre-approval of their illegal acts.

The Liberals said that they would hold public meetings to get input on how the bill should be changed. So far there have been no meetings.

But Hillary was easier prey. By the time the
Clintons left the White House, a notion — not entirely without merit —
had taken root in the public mind that she sometimes skirted the truth.

And let's be frank. She's a woman. For Republicans, she fits into a "sub-catagory." And they claim that she's corrupt:

On the face of it, the email scandal should
have appealed only to IT aficionados. Her stated and very plausible
motive for using a private cellphone on government business was that she
didn’t want to carry two mobile devices.

However,
this was Hillary Clinton. Once again, an investigation was launched.
Once again, she was cleared of criminal wrongdoing (although not of bad
judgment) — this time by the FBI.

A House
investigation into another soi-disant Clinton scandal — her role in the
2012 attack on a U.S. consulate in Libya that killed four Americans —
found no evidence of negligence on her part.

But
both contretemps served to reawaken the old doubts. In May, one
pollster interviewed Americans with a negative view of Clinton. It
found, to no one’s surprise, that 50 per cent of Republicans polled
found her untrustworthy.

More alarmingly for the Democratic presidential candidate, it found that 39 per cent of Democrats polled held the same view.

Donald Trump -- who operates on the assumption that small phrases entertain small minds -- has taken to calling her "crooked Hillary." Meanwhile, he's doing his best to throw a cone of silence around his own business practices.

Sunday, July 24, 2016

Conrad Black lives on another planet than the rest of us. He is untroubled by the anxieties of those of us who are mere mortals. That's why he believes that we've misunderstood Donald Trump. In Friday's National Post he opined:

These parrots of gloom should be celebrating the fact that one of the
only moderates among the Republican candidates won. Senator Ted Cruz
pitched his campaign to the Bible-thumping corn-cobbers with M16 rifles
in the rear windows of their pickup trucks and announced that God had
told him to run. Trump and Sanders are the only candidates who favour
universal health care, and Trump, contrary to a great deal of unfounded
over-reactive comment about him, never said anything remotely
antagonistic about women, gays, African-Americans or Latinos who came to
the U.S. legally.

And, he predicts, Trump will move to the centre and radiate peace, order and good government:

Now that Trump is the nominee, having come from the political wilderness
and paid for his own campaign, he will drastically scale back the
stylistic infelicities (which are as disagreeable to me as to most
serious people, but are just part of his shtick). He is not ideological
and will make the system work — he is, as he never tires of telling us, a
deal-maker. In foreign policy, he will be neither trigger-happy like
George W., nor an other-worldly pacifist like Obama. He will spend a
billion dollars of the Republican party’s money reminding the country
that legally and ethically, Hillary is carrying more dead weight cargo
than the Queen Mary. He and Hillary will now both campaign toward the
centre, but whoever wins, this is the last stand of moderation. One more
debacle like the past four or five presidential terms, and the animals
will be released. The paint-ball parks, the shooting ranges, and the
teeming ghettos (scores of millions of Americans unnoticed by Norman
Rockwell, Grandma Moses and Walt Disney) will not be gulled again by a
limousine liberal in a neon pantsuit or a pseudo-blue-collar
billionaire.

The animals have already been released. And they're furious at people like Lord Black. One would have hoped that his stay in a Florida prison would have acquainted Black with the earthly existence of mere mortals. Obviously, it hasn't.

Saturday, July 23, 2016

In the wake of the Republican Convention, Charles Dermer writes that there are three lessons progressives should remember about the failure of Weimar Germany:

First, the German Left splintered and failed to create strong coalitions.
The Social Democrats and the German Communist Party -- both large
parties of Labor -- made little efforts to work together or to organize
and coordinate closely with many of the remarkably progressive Weimar
urban feminist, gay and civil rights movements. Much of the blame falls
on the Communists, who decided to take their marching orders from
Stalin, believing that the collapse of the German economy would lead to a
Communist revolution. But the Social Democrats were also responsible,
aligning themselves with conservative parties and aristocratic landed
elites -- and supporting repression of Far Left movements while failing
to reach out to and make concessions to either the Communists or the
movements.

Had the Social Democrats and Communists formed a common bloc, working
in a strong coalition with progressive urban cultural movements, they
would have controlled the majority of Parliament and might have kept
power. The lesson here is that we must wrestle with the potential ways
in which the Democratic Party, the Sanders supporters and our major
social justice movements might work together, building a coalitional
front that can push back against the dangers posed by Trump, promote the
aims of the Sanders "revolution," and help unite or "universalize" Left
grassroots movements in a long-term effort to create a systemic
transformation of militarized, racialized, patriarchal capitalism.

Second, to build a united front, all types of progressives must
grapple with the real threat of a Trump victory and of a broader
right-wing populist ascendancy, with or without a Trump victory. The
German Left -- as well as the German corporate and landed gentry
Establishment -- never took Hitler seriously, dismissing Far Right
movements and believing Hitler had no large popular base. Likewise, many
US progressives cannot imagine that Americans would embrace Far Right
populism and elect an overtly racist demagogue such as Trump.

The Weimar Left and the German Establishment wildly underestimated
the Far Right and Hitler's resonance during a massive economic crisis
with a public with authoritarian tendencies. They lost touch with the
working and lower middle class, especially the rural or small town
population, who felt they were losing not just their jobs but their
country and culture. They also never believed Hitler could gain so much
support in his pursuit of genocide.

This leads to a third lesson: the need for a massive shift in the
Democratic Party and a resurgence of progressive movements to solve the
economic crisis and address the sense of national decline perpetrated by
the Establishment itself. The Weimar Left, especially the Social
Democratic Party, largely disconnected from grassroots urban progressive
cultural movements, had no transformative vision or energy. It was an
exhausted, reformist party offering no economic or social solutions. The
Communists didn't even try, as they promoted collapse.

The inconvenient truth is that the Democrats have bought into neo-liberalism with almost the same fervor as the Republicans:

The Democratic Party in the age of Clintons, disconnected from social movements, has aligned with the corporate and military establishment.
While Bernie Sanders resonated far and wide because of his urgent
message of "political revolution" and democratic socialism, Hillary
Clinton has only begun to -- at least in rhetoric -- embrace the
importance of structural change. But to win, she has to take Sanders
more seriously and respond not only to his demands but also to the
demands of the civil rights, Black liberation, peace and environmental
movements.

Germans made the mistake of believing that Hitler was simply a nutbar who would self destruct. That's what he eventually did. But what he left in his wake was utter devastation.

Friday, July 22, 2016

Rick Salutin speculates this morning that we may be living in a non-leadership moment. Consider what has happened in the United States:

It’s tempting to say Donald Trump is all leader and no ship: no party
inclinations in any recognizable forms, nor typical policies,
organization, strategy or scripts. It centres on him alone. Except for a
literal ship, labelled Trump, that he flies in on and speaks in front
of. He likes it so much, he flies it home to New York each night to
sleep in his bed — which is kind of touching — then drops in again next
day.

In the UK, Jeremy Corbin is Trump's polar opposite:

There’s now a full-blown leadership challenge to him, before he’s fought
a single election — after being elected with unprecedented member
backing. Why? After one of Corbyn’s shadow cabinet, Hilary Benn, was
sacked (as they say) for plotting against his leader — being the UK,
foes are called regicides — Benn explained, “Jeremy is not a leader.”
That’s what they all repeat. He won’t work ferociously, doesn’t build
bridges or concoct complex strategies to ally with others and achieve
power, utterly lacks charisma, seems uninterested in doing anything he
hasn’t done for years. Yet somehow he hoovers up manic support.

His opposition claimed that Justin Trudeau was not a leader -- but he has surprised a lot of people:

Justin Trudeau did it with all the basics of the old formula, though in
his own rendition — which is worth keeping in mind. But something else
is also going on, especially in the aftermath of the quashed hopes that
attended Obama’s coming. Would you rather have a victory for plausible
principles or one for leadership itself without believable ideals?
Because in the UK at the moment it seems impossible to have both
elements.

Thursday, July 21, 2016

Brent Rathgeber writes that the Republican Party is dead. It's been replaced by The Donald Trump Show:

This is no longer the Republican Party; it’s becoming the Trump Party —
bombastic, obnoxious and playing deliriously on the fears of white
America. Trump has dumped the conservative Republican playbook — he
favours brick walls over free trade, a police state over smaller
government. His appeal is based almost entirely on xenophobia and many
Americans (mostly, but not entirely, Republicans) seem to believe what
he is saying about Mexicans and Muslims.

The only constant coming out of the Trump Convention has been the
sustained, visceral and vicious attacks on Hillary Clinton. I’m no fan
of the former Secretary of State, but one should rely on facts
when attacking a political opponent — not wild hyperbole and unhinged
fantasy. Given the lack of anything like substantive policy in his
campaign, Trump’s strategy seems to be limited to malicious, often
reckless, character assassination.

And that may be the most alarming thing about Trump — nobody really knows what he wants to do
as president. His speeches are generally too incoherent to allow for
inferences about whether he stands for anything apart from racial
prejudice and misogyny. He is unpredictable, offensive and a blowhard.
He is one of the most polarizing figures to aspire to high office in a
western democracy in ages.

Trump represents Richard Nixon's Southern Strategy in full fruition. His supporters are seething with resentment and not very bright. All they bring to the table is a long, hard hate. And Trump -- who has transformed the party into a cult of personality -- has focused that hate on Hillary Clinton.

Last night Ted Cruz refused to support Trump. He urged Americans to vote their conscience. Rethgeber understands Cruz' message. That's why he left the Stephen Harper Show.

Wednesday, July 20, 2016

Andrew Nikiforuk writes that we falsely assume we can clean up oil spills -- because we believe we have the technology to do it:

In many respects, society's theatrical response to catastrophic oil
spills resembles the way medical professionals respond to aggressive
cancer in an elderly patient. Because surgery is available, it is often
used. Surgery also creates the impression that the health-care system is
doing something even though it can't change or reverse the patient's
ultimate condition. In an oil-based society, the cleanup delusion is
also irresistible. Just as it is difficult for us to acknowledge the
limits of medical intervention, society struggles to acknowledge the
limits of technologies or the consequences of energy habits. And that's
where the state of marine oil spill response sits today: it creates
little more than an illusion of a cleanup. Scientists -- outside the oil
industry -- call it "prime-time theatre" or "response theatre."

Technology has its limits:

Part of the illusion has been created by ineffective technologies
adopted and billed by industry as "world class." Ever since the 1970s,
the oil and gas industry has trotted out four basic ways to deal with
ocean spills: booms to contain the oil; skimmers to remove the oil; fire
to burn the oil; sand chemical dispersants, such as Corexit, to break
the oil into smaller pieces. For small spills these technologies can
sometimes make a difference, but only in sheltered waters. None has ever
been effective in containing large spills.

Conventional containment booms, for example, don't work in icy water, or
where waves run amok. Burning oil merely transforms one grave problem
-- water pollution -- into sooty greenhouse gases and creates air
pollution. Dispersants only hide the oil by scattering small droplets
into the water column, yet they often don't even do that since
conditions have to be just right for dispersants to work. Darryl
McMahon, a director of RESTCo, a firm pursuing more effective cleanup
technologies, has written extensively about the problem, and his opinion
remains: "Sadly, even after over 40 years experience, the outcomes are
not acceptable. In many cases, the strategy is still to ignore spills on
open water, only addressing them when the slicks reach shore."

The only way to avoid oil spills is to avoid oil. Yet the word from Cleveland this week is that the Republicans plan to revive the Keystone XL pipeline. It's called blind stupidity.

Tuesday, July 19, 2016

As the Republican Convention unfolds, certain loudmouths are given the stage. One of them is Steve King, a member of the House of Representatives from Iowa. Consider the following story from the New York Daily News:

One Iowa congressman may not know history, but he’ll go down in it for his ignorance.

Rep. Steve King, known for his racially charged remarks, said Monday
that non-white “subgroups” have not contributed to civilization.

“I would ask you to go back through history and figure out where are
these contributions that have been made by these other categories of
people that you are talking about. Where did any other subgroup of
people contribute more to civilization?” the Republican said.

“Than white people?” moderator Chris Hayes interjected.

“Than Western civilization itself that's rooted in Western Europe,
Eastern Europe and the United States of America, and every place where
Christianity settled the world," King replied.

And, as a corollary to that thought, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan sent out a picture of himself yesterday, with what he figured were "the most number of Capitol Hill interns in a single selfie." You'll notice that there is not one person of colour in the photograph.

When Donald Trump proclaims that he will make America great again, there is a clear subtext. Great means white. He'll build walls to keep non-whites out. It's those folks who drive Republicans crazy -- because they know that white people are well on their way to minority status in the United States.

Trump and modern Republicans forget that it was their hero, Ronald Reagan, who urged that The Wall be torn down. And it was another Republican president -- Dwight Eisenhower -- who said, "Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him."

Monday, July 18, 2016

Where have all the leaders gone? That's the question Michael Harris asks over at ipolitics. The newly anointed and the wish to be anointed don't inspire a lot of confidence:

As the apocalypse beckons, the need for real political wisdom has
never been greater. But no Titans have emerged. Instead, obscene
caricatures of political leadership have risen to the top of several
world establishments.

In Britain, Theresa May sits astride the absurd political ascendancy
of the post-Brexit-referendum era. One of her first acts was to shut
down the U.K.’s Department of Energy and Climate Change. Britain’s Tin
Lady made another decision which is even more dangerous to the planet on
the short term: putting the Brexit Boor and “serial liar” Boris Johnson
in charge of foreign affairs.

One has to wonder about May's appointment of Johnson as Britain's chief diplomat:

Johnson is the man whose claim to fame is a bad mop of hair, pants that
are perpetually on fire, and a yen for racism. Making him the country’s
chief diplomat is like putting Bernie Madoff in charge of pension plan.
After Barack Obama stuck his nose in the Brexit debate, urging the UK to
remain in the European Union, Johnson responded by talking about the
U.S. president’s “part Kenyan” ancestry.

Johnson’s previous remarks though made clear that his jibe wasn’t meant
as a compliment. As reported in the Guardian, Johnson went on to
describe Africans as “piccaninnies” with “watermelon smiles.” Their
problem, he opined, was “not that we were once in charge, but that we
are not in charge any more.”

Over in France, Francois Holland is cracking down on civil liberties, but the attacks keep coming:

The government has used its extraordinary new police and anti-terror
powers to round up and arrest hundreds of its own citizens. Liberty,
Fraternity, and Equality — the clarion call of one of the world’s most
famous revolutions — has morphed into an obsession with policing.
Strange that. Civil rights are cancelled but terrorist attacks increase.
The French once exported the Statue of Liberty to America. Today they
are building a Statue of Oppression at home.

And, in the land of the Statue of Liberty, the choice is between Donald and Hillary:

Look at the choice facing Americans in this November’s presidential
election — a political lifer investigated by the FBI for possible
breaches of national security while Secretary of State; versus a
to-the-manor-born ignoramus with a Jesus complex whose idea of big,
international news is a new irrigation system for his golf course in
Scotland.

They don't stoke inspiration. But they do stoke fear. Harris writes, "Frightened people always have an index finger ready to point to the
external causes of their woes. They’re also more likely to ignore any
part they played in creating the morass like, say, invading Iraq in the
first place."

And, before we get too smug, let's remember that the guy we just sent packing set up a snitch line so that the paranoid among us could rat on those of us they felt engaged in "barbaric practices." When leaders go searching for scapegoats, anyone of us could qualify for that moniker.

Sunday, July 17, 2016

As Donald Trump -- and now Mike Pence -- head for Cleveland, a group of prominent American historians have decided to launch a full scale assault on Trump. With the help of filmmaker Ken Burns, they have set up a Facebook page that has been garnering millions of views.

Saturday, July 16, 2016

Tony Clement wants to be leader of the Conservative Party. Perhaps he believes that the third time will be the charm. But, Bob Hepburn writes, there are five reasons Clement should reconsider his bid:

First, Clement deservedly earned the title of “The King of Pork-Barrel Politics”
for his disgraceful role in doling out $50 million in special projects
in his riding that were to be related to the 2010 G8 summit in
Huntsville. Instead, most of the money went to totally unrelated
projects far from the summit site, such as renovating bandshells and
gazebos, planting flowers, repairing public washrooms and paving roads
in his riding.

Second, Clement became an international joke when he enthusiastically killed the important long-form census
of 2011. He saw it as an invasion of privacy for asking such delicate
questions as how many bathrooms are in your home. The move so outraged
Munir Sheikh, the country’s chief statistician, that he quit in disgust.

Third, Clement is talking up his immigrant background, but he has a lot
to answer for on immigration. Despite being a senior cabinet minister,
he did and said nothing over the last few years as the Harper government
deliberately dragged its heels in allowing Syrian refugees to come to
Canada. He also kept his mouth shut when his cabinet colleague Kellie
Leitch proposed a snitch hotline clearly aimed at Muslims where people
could report “barbaric cultural practices.”

Fourth, Clement is a Harper clone — and happily so. Like Harper, he is
stiff, devoid of charisma and uninspiring. He is well-liked by the
out-of-favour Harperites and offers voters nothing fresh, from his call
to stop funding the CBC to Iran-bashing that voters didn’t see — and
reject — in Harper himself in the last election.

And, fifth, there is Peter Mackay. Hepburn is sure he too will throw his hat in the ring. Mackay also has lots of skeletons in his closet. But, at least, he seems less moribund than Clement.

All in all, they're not an inspiring bunch. But, then, they never were.

Friday, July 15, 2016

Patrick Bazeau walked back into the Senate yesterday, the charges he faced having been dropped. What does that say about the government and the man that brought the charges? It's pretty clear that the Harper government was a smear machine. And, in the end, the smears didn't stick.

In recent months the Red Chamber has been going through its own version of rehab, working to show that it actually is
a chamber of sober second thought, rather than a den of
feckless spendthrifts. It voted to amend the government’s assisted
suicide legislation (though it ultimately passed the government’s more
restrictive version), amended another piece of legislation conferring
unionization rights on RCMP officers (which will come before the House
in the fall) and, most recently, issued a report calling for better integration of Syrian refugees.

The changes will have to be internal. There will never be enough support in the provinces for wholesale change or abolition. So it will be up to the Senators themselves to design that change. That should be a little easier to do when the majority of Senators are officially independent.

Thursday, July 14, 2016

Stephen Harper's public career has been filled with betrayals. He added another one last week. Brent Rathgeber writes:

Wildrose Leader Brian Jean was in the crowd for this year’s riding
association BBQ — feeling less than festive, no doubt. Patrons were
expecting Harper merely to announce that he was resigning as their MP.
Instead, he enthusiastically and unequivocally endorsed Jason Kenney for
the leadership of the PC Party of Alberta — instantly turning a social gathering into a campaign event.

It’s important to remember just how unusual an action this was for
the former prime minister. When Harper was running things, Conservative
MPs were expressly discouraged from wading into provincial politics.
When the Harperites were in power, PMO staffers frequently reminded
caucus members that, as the federal government, “we” had to deal with
the people in power at the provincial level, no matter what party “they”
represented.

But with the PCs out of power in Alberta and the CPC in Opposition in
Ottawa, the rules seem to have changed. Either that, or the MP for
Calgary Heritage assumes the rules that applied to his caucus don’t
apply to him. They don’t apply to interim CPC leader Rona Ambrose
either; she also endorsed Kenney, as Harper encouraged all CPC members
in Alberta to join Kenney’s campaign to lead the PC Party into oblivion.

Harper always maintained that he made the rules -- and he could break them. But Alberta's Progressive Conservatives and Wild Rosies are not happy:

You’ve already heard about the pushback in the PC camp. Progressive
PCs such as MLA Sandra Jensen and former MLAs Thomas Lukaszuk and Dave
Quest are openly questioning whether Kenney’s vision clashes with the PC
party’s platform.

What you haven’t heard is how Harper’s endorsement is going over with
the Wildrose crowd. Many Wildrose supporters were stunned by it, and by
Harper’s decision to publicly snub Jean.

Mr. Harper has always believed that leading a political party implied kingship by Divine Right. He has provided yet another illustration of who he is.

Wednesday, July 13, 2016

Britain is in crisis. The United States is roiling. But, in Canada, we're pretty sanguine. Lawrence Martin writes:

In Canada, it’s the 1960s in an entirely
different optic. None of the rage and tumult. Rather, a new harmony. As
we hit 150 years, with our relative unity, peace and prosperity, it’s
akin to the time of the centennial. Crises elsewhere make us look even
better. A haven of stability and hope.

Just like 50 years ago, there’s a Camelot
North aura brought on by a new-styled leader. On Pierre Trudeau’s
ascension to power in 1968, The London Spectator wrote, or rather
hyperbolized: “It was as if Canada had come of age, as if he himself
singlehandedly would catapult the country into the brilliant sunshine of
the late 20th century from the stagnant swamp of traditionalism and
mediocrity in which Canadian politics had been bogged down for years.”

In the UK and the U.S, baby boomers are making their last stand. In Canada, the torch has been passed to the next generation:

The Canadian advantage is not just in
avoiding the fracturing in the United States, Britain and elsewhere.
Rather, we’ve crossed a threshold. With this government we finally have
given the boot to the baby boom generation, a generation which has
dominated Canadian life for four decades.

Today’s
government is young not just by age but in spirit and, by contrast to
the venomous partisanship of its predecessor, attitude. The United
States is about to elect a president who will be 69 (Hillary Clinton) or
70 (Donald Trump). Britain’s soon-to-be new leader, Theresa May, is
turning 60. In neither country will the thinking at the top be at one
with the mindset of the new generational wave.

The
well-aged political leaders, particularly those on the right, sustained
much of their support from old whites or those with old white
attitudes. They mock Justin Trudeau for an alleged lack of substance.
The younger generation would tell them about his substance; that it is
racial tolerance, that it is gender rights, that it is preserving the
planet, that it is social justice for native people, that it is open and
fair democracy.

One would be wide to remember that what happens in Britain and the United States eventually makes its way here. But there is no law against appreciating our good fortune.

Tuesday, July 12, 2016

Chris Hedges puts the recent violence in the United States into a larger context. It's what happens, he writes, when the corporate state has become firmly entrenched:

Globalization
has created a serious problem of “surplus” or “redundant” labor in
deindustrialized countries. The corporate state has responded to the
phenomenon of “surplus” labor with state terror and mass incarceration.
It has built a physical and legal mechanism that lurks like a plague
bacillus within the body politic to be imposed, should wider segments of
society resist, on all of us.

The physics of human nature dictates that the longer the state
engages in indiscriminate legalized murder, especially when those
killings can be documented on video or film and disseminated to the
public, the more it stokes the revenge assassinations we witnessed in Dallas.
This counterviolence serves the interests of the corporate state. The
murder of the five Dallas police officers allows the state to deify its
blue-uniformed enforcers, demonize those who protest police killings and
justify greater measures of oppression, often in the name of reform.

Therefore, policing becomes militarized. And the response is also militarized -- a sniper on the rooftop. All of this takes place in a community which lacks empathy:

Neoliberalism, like all utopian ideologies, requires the banishment of
empathy. The inability to feel empathy is the portal to an evil often
carried out in the name of progress. A world without empathy rejects as
an absurdity the call to love your neighbor as yourself. It elevates the
cult of the self. It divides the world into winners and losers. It
celebrates power and wealth. Those who are discarded by the corporate
state, especially poor people of color, are viewed as life unworthy of
life. They are denied the dignity of work and financial autonomy. They
are denied an education and proper medical care, meaning many die from
preventable illnesses. They are criminalized. They are trapped from
birth to death in squalid police states. And they are blamed for their
own misery.

Something to think about in these days following the death of Elie Wiesel.

Monday, July 11, 2016

Jason Kenney has headed back to the Calgary Stampede, proudly waving to the crowds. But, Michael Harris writes, it's easy to spot the phonies:

Jason Kenney is taking part in a parade — riding in the back of a 1958
Ford Fairlane, with an army tank behind him, and a gas-guzzling 1959
Caddy in front carrying fellow-delusional Michelle Rempel. I guess the
cars were interesting. (At least Premier Notley rode a Pinto that wasn’t
made in Detroit – the kind with four legs, not an explosive gas tank.)

Like Stephen Harper, Kenney claims to be a son of Alberta. But Kenny was born in Ontario -- Oakville to be precise. And he has had an interesting political journey, claiming various residences along the way:

As for his resumé, Kenney left university to work for the
Saskatchewan Liberal Party. That led to an odd post for a guy who would
one day run the right-wing Canadian Taxpayers Federation, and after
that, spend so much time at Harper’s side dismantling Canada: Kenney
became executive-assistant to Ralph Goodale, now Canada’s public safety
minister in the Trudeau majority government.

Later, Kenney bounced around like a rubber ball, from Liberals, to
Reform, to Canadian Alliance and finally to the CPC. He then entered a
decade of celebrity and someonehood as cabinet minister, organizational
Machiavelli, and heir apparent in the event Harper had died of fright
reading political polls in 2015.

He has always had a nose for the main chance. And his nose brings him back to Alberta to, he says, "unite the right." But Albertans may not buy the package:

Kenney’s conversion on the road to being a mere MP smacks of the
worst kind of political opportunism. Someone should ask Kenney when he
decided to save Alberta — before or after the Harper government’s
crushing loss? And what will he tell the voters of Calgary Midnapore?
They thought they were voting for a federal MP. Will they really believe
that he always wanted to be a provincial messiah for a discredited
Conservative party but just forgot to tell them about it when he was
soliciting their vote? What would he have done had Dear Leader won the
federal election, returned to Alberta to perform a by-pass operation on
the beating heart of Conservatism, or settled down into some jammy
ministerial post in Ottawa?

On the face of it, there is monstrous presumptuousness operating
here, exactly the kind that consigned the Alberta PC’s last
carpetbagger, Jim Prentice, to the ash-heap of political history. Does
Kenney really think that Albertans will swallow the story that the
carnage in the oil patch is Notley’s doing? And why would Wild Rose want
to unite behind a man whose party couldn’t get a single pipeline built
after a decade in power, and which aligned itself with a PC party in
Alberta that mismanaged one of the greatest resources on earth and then
told Albertans they were the problem when the bitumen hit the fan?

On the weekend, Kenney got Stephen Harper's blessing. Sometimes a blessing turns out to be a curse.

Sunday, July 10, 2016

It's been a week since Elie Wiesel's death. Avi Benolo writes that he was the last of his generation:

His generation was the generation of the 20th century that struggled to
put a broken world back together. His generation was the generation of
Martin Luther King Jr. A generation that fought for social justice and
humanity. It was a generation that spoke about not being silent. In
King’s words, “our lives begin to end the day we become silent about
things that matter.” Similarly, Wiesel would argue “we must take sides.
Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the
tormentor, never the tormented.”

With Elie Wiesel’s passing, the great generation that empowered us and
guided us to speak out against repression, violence and hatred - is
gone. Gone are the icons who refused to shake hands with the devil,
choosing instead to impart their righteousness through their actions and
wisdom. Mahatma Gandhi, one of the first leaders widely revered for his
non-violent methods, gave the world a new path toward freedom. He put
the responsibility for social change on each and every one of us,
instructing, “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” And
so, each of us becomes the centre – the bridge and the pinnacle – for
expressing goodness.

Besides King and Gandhi, that generation included Helen Keller, Mother Theresa and Nelson Mandela. Like Weisel, they believed that the greatest sin was indifference and it spread with silence in the face of evil.

Benolo asks, "Who will take their place?" So far, there don't appear to be a lot of successors.

Saturday, July 09, 2016

There is a long history of race hatred in the United States. Last week added a particularly horrific chapter to that history. Most tragically, the party which was born out of opposition to that history has become its modern home. Paul Krugman writes:

To
put it bluntly, the modern Republican Party is in essence a machine
designed to deliver high after-tax incomes to the 1 percent. Look at [Paul] Ryan: Has he ever shown any willingness, for any reason, to make the
rich pay so much as a dime more in taxes? Comforting the very
comfortable is what it’s all about.

But
not many voters are interested in that goal. So the party has prospered
politically by harnessing its fortunes to racial hostility, which it
has not-so-discreetly encouraged for decades.

The late Lee Atwater taught Republicans to talk in code -- beginning with the first President Bush:

These days, former President George H.W. Bush is treated as an elder
statesman, too gentlemanly to endorse the likes of Donald Trump — but
remember, he’s the one who ran the Willie Horton ad. Mitt Romney
is also sitting this one out — but he was happy to accept Mr. Trump’s
endorsement back when the candidate was best known for his rabid
birtherism.

There are those in the party who are not racists. But some of its leaders are -- because they have adopted racist rhetoric to achieve their economic goals:

I’m not saying that all leading Republicans are racists; most of them
probably aren’t, although Mr. Trump probably is. It is that in pursuit
of their economic — actually, class-interest — goals they were willing
to act as enablers, to make their party a safe space for prejudice. And
the result is a party base that is strikingly racist, in which a plurality of voters believe
that Mr. Obama is a Muslim, and more — a base just waiting for a
candidate willing to blurt out what the establishment conveyed by
innuendo.

But they are not the party's only enablers. A large number of journalists -- under the banner of "balanced" -- have refused to confront what has happened to the party:

Political analysts who tried to talk about the G.O.P.’s transformation, like Norman Ornstein
of the American Enterprise Institute, were effectively ostracized for
years. Instead, the respectable, “balanced” thing was to pretend that
the parties were symmetric, to turn a blind eye to the cynicism of the
modern Republican project.

The point is that this kind of false balance does real harm. The
Republican establishment directly enabled the forces that led to Trump;
but many influential people outside the G.O.P. in effect enabled the
enablers. And so here we are.

Friday, July 08, 2016

The Chilcot Inquiry has totally discredited Tony Blair. But, amid the rubble of his reputation, Paul Heinbecker writes that there are five lessons to be learned:

A first lesson for Canada is that foreign policy decisions, especially
those involving peace and war, must be guided by values as well as
interests. The report makes it clear the essential purpose of the
British government going into that war in Iraq was to maintain its
privileged relationship with Washington. The British went along to get
along.

A second lesson Canada should draw from the report is to be wary of
group-think and overly confident intelligence services. According to
Chilcot, “there was an ingrained belief in the U.K. policy and
intelligence communities that Iraq had retained some chemical and
biological capabilities; that it was determined to preserve and if
possible enhance them – and, in the future, to acquire a nuclear
capability; and that it was able to conceal its activities from the UN
inspectors.”

A third lesson we should draw from the Iraq Inquiry report is the
importance of the role of the UN Security Council. According to Mr.
Chilcot, “most members of the Security Council could not be convinced
that peaceful options to disarm Iraq had been exhausted and that
military action was therefore justified.”

A fourth lesson is that, with the Chilcot report on Iraq, the Butler
Review of Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction and other reviews,
the British have manifested an appetite for accountability that is
probably unmatched elsewhere.

A fifth lesson for Canada is that, especially on crucial foreign-policy
decisions, it is never true that we have no choice but to support our
allies. We always have a choice, if we are willing to pay the cost
required by our values. And as it happened, those costs in the case of
the Iraq war were entirely bearable.

It's worth remembering that Mr. Harper claimed that he did not believe in going along to get along. But he was hellbent to join the Coalition of the Willing. And he joined every succeeding Middle East military mission.

Rumour has it that he plans to start his own international consulting business. The world would be better off if he bought a Tim Horton's franchise.

Thursday, July 07, 2016

When bigots and buffoons -- like Nigel Farage and Donald Trump -- oppose world trade deals, Linda McQuaig writes, they give the globalizers plenty of ammunition:

Having such a collection of bigots and boors
opposing “globalization” may turn out to be a boon for those promoting
globalization — that is, the laws that govern the global economy.

This
is unfortunate, since these laws — and the international trade deals
that enforce them — have delivered benefits almost exclusively to those
at the top in recent years, and should be thoroughly overhauled.

When you look at history and the evidence, there are good reasons to rebel against NAFTA and the proposed TPP deal:

There’s a litany of reasons why any sensible person would resist these trade deals.

But
the most outrageous aspect of them has always been the special set of
legal rights they bestow on foreign corporations and investors. These
rights — which go beyond anything that exists in domestic or
international law — enable wealthy foreigners to sue governments over
policies the foreigners don’t like, and to have their lawsuits decided
by closed tribunals.

Indeed, the TPP could open a floodgate of new claims by wealthy foreigners, according to a powerful report by Osgoode Hall law professor Gus Van Harten, released last month but ignored by the media.

“With
the TPP, many more such claims will become possible,” notes Van Harten,
an expert in international law and investment treaties.

The
report documents how corporations and wealthy investors have taken
advantage of the bizarrely generous legal rights available to them under
NAFTA, suing Canada 39 times and winning more than $190 million in
compensation from Canadian taxpayers. There is no cap on how high the
compensation can be, and the vast majority of it goes to the ultra-rich – corporations with annual revenues over $1 billion and individuals with net wealth above $100 million.

With all their sound, fury and obfuscation, the buffoons are making matters worse.

Wednesday, July 06, 2016

One possible answer is that Kenney has already been there, done that,
having effectively put Harper over the top in 2011 with his tireless
outreach to new Canadians (the former PM gave partial credit for the
victory to Kenney, explicitly, in an interview with the Wall Street
Journal in September of 2014). Another is that Kenney may be bored, at
48, and craving a big new challenge. And a third reason — perhaps the
key for an ambitious, driven man such as this — may be that he doesn’t
believe the Conservatives can defeat Trudeau in 2019, regardless of who
leads them. If the Liberals are in for the long haul, say two
consecutive majorities, he’d be years cooling his heels on the back
benches in the prime of his political life.

Consider what has happened to the Harper Party in the last two years:

And here’s where all that gets us: Stephen Harper’s perennial
ministerial heavyweights, in no particular order, were Flaherty, John
Baird, James Moore, Jason Kenney and Peter MacKay. With all five gone
(MacKay may yet declare for federal leader but has not done so) and
Harper himself, of course, gone, the party truly has entered uncharted
territory.

The party which once ruled with an iron fist will be wandering in the desert for quite awhile. And there's no Moses in sight.

Tuesday, July 05, 2016

Nigel Farage has resigned. But the arrogance and hypocrisy he stood for will not depart with him. His speech to the European Parliament on the day after the Brexit vote was teeming with his usual swill. Dan Leger writes:

Farage’s gloating oration in Brussels followed the victory by anti-EU
forces in the U.K.’s ill-considered Brexit referendum. In the speech,
Farage repeatedly insulted his fellow parliamentarians with a sneering
arrogance that will do little to help Britain build new international
relationships.

“I know that virtually none of you,” he said, “have ever done a proper
job in your lives, or worked in business, or worked in trade, or indeed
ever created a job.”

Remember, these are the words of a full-time politician and former
commodities trader, professions not known as drivers of employment.

Farage complained that he hadn’t been taken seriously when he first
became a salaried and expenses-collecting member of the Euro Parliament
he so despises, 17 years ago.

“You all laughed at me. I have to say, you’re not laughing now, are you?”

The problem with people like Farage and Donald Trump, writes Leger, is that they have made hate acceptable in modern politics. And while the likes of Farage and Boris Johnson have exited stage right, exposed as the buffoons they are, there will be others who will follow in their footsteps:

Any fool can see through Trump, the preening egotist and shallow showoff. And most can see through Farage’s lies and smugness.

But what if a candidate emerges who isn’t an obvious buffoon, but with similarly toxic ideas?

Seventy-five years ago, German fascists cited “Blut und Boden,” “blood
and soil” in their program of race hatred. A similar call might work
with American or British nativists, invoking the idea that people who
share ethnicity and territory should band together to keep the “others”
out.

In the wake of the Brexit vote, racial incidents are rising across the
U.K., with harassment of immigrants and outsiders. A pro-Europe MP was
murdered by a white supremacist right before the referendum.

At Trump’s mass rallies, racist and misogynistic insults are routinely hurled around by the candidate and his supporters.

If Farage, Johnson and Trump are harbingers of the future, we have much to worry about.

Monday, July 04, 2016

Bill Clinton did Hillary no favours last week when he "accidentally" met with U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch. However, he did give Donald Trump lots of ammunition to use against "crooked Hillary:" Michael Harris writes:

The way Trump tells it, Hillary is a kind of entrepreneurial Benedict
Arnold, personally raking in millions along with her famous husband
under the guise of philanthropy. Trump insists that she shouldn’t be
running for president: she should be making muffins in the same cell
once used by Martha Stewart to refine her skills of insider-baking.

But when it comes to corruption -- best defined as having complete contempt for the Constitution -- Mr. Trump has no equals:

For starters, the deepest form of corruption for someone seeking the
presidency is to propose measures that violate the constitution. By that
measure, Trump himself is dangerously corrupt. It is against the U.S.
Constitution to discriminate against people on the basis of their
religion. Trump has proposed that in one form or another many times
over.

In a country with First Amendment protections, it is unconstitutional
to ban the press from covering a public event. In black-balling the
Washington Post, the Guardian, and Buzzfeed from some of his events,
Trump has done just that.

It is illegal under the U.S. Constitution (as well as domestic and
international law), to practice torture. Trump has endorsed
water-boarding and promised “worse”, despite the fact that any such
presidential order issued to either military or intelligence personnel
would be illegal.

And, on the subject of corruption, consider the two men who are rumored to be at the top of the list as Trump's running mates -- Newt Gingrich and Chris Christie:

Christie has more baggage than a caravan of overloaded camels. First
there was Bridgegate, that incredible act of political vengeance that
saw Christie’s office touch off a massive traffic jam on the George
Washington Bridge in 2013 just to get even with a political rival who
refused to throw his political support to the governor. Three Christie
staffers, Bill Baroni, Bridget Anne Kelly, and David Wildstein were
indicted for this caper.

Although Christie himself was never charged, and manfully blamed the
whole thing on rogue staffers, U.S. National Public Radio is now
reporting that investigators never saw Chris Christie’s personal email
account that he used during the bridge shutdown in 2013. Nor did they
have access to a cellphone he used to contact the man who controlled the
George Washington Bridge, the Chairman of the Port Authority of New
York and New Jersey, David Samson.

And then there is Gingrich:

True, he was once Speaker of the House of Representatives. But that
career ended when the House Ethics Committee hit him with a $300,000
fine for the use of nonprofits for partisan political gains. The Ethics
Committee arrived at their action after looking into 84 ethics
complaints against the former Speaker.

Some of the other highlights on Newt’s resumé include being on the
wrong side of the House banking scandal, and criticizing mortgage lender
Freddie Mac while quietly collecting $1.6 million as a consultant to
it. He is also the sensitive husband who insisted on discussing the
terms of his divorce from his first wife, Jackie, while she was in bed
recovering from her third cancer surgery.

What a team! Hillary has her problems. But the Donald turns swimming pools into cesspools.

Sunday, July 03, 2016

Tony Burman published an intriguing column in yesterday's Toronto Star. Given last week's fallout from the referendum, he believes that Britain and Europe may patch up their differences:

That astonishing thought became more than
possible this week as Britain’s political battleground descended into
treachery and farce.

In a chaotic response
to the slim referendum vote to pull Britain out of the European Union,
London’s Palace of Westminster was littered with the victims of
political backstabbing and intrigue.

Boris Johnson's political ambitions came to a crashing halt:

Johnson, who studied classics at Oxford University and once argued that
studying Greek and Latin would keep young people off the streets, became
the centre of his own personal Greek drama. In an act of treachery, his
close colleague, Michael Gove, withdrew his support of Johnson at the
last minute, saying that he now felt “Boris cannot provide the
leadership.” Gove announced he would run for the top job instead.

Jeremy Corbin's political future looks no better:

As if this wasn’t enough, Britain’s opposition
Labour party is also in tatters. Its leader, Jeremy Corbyn, under
attack for his lacklustre support of the pro-Europe side in the
referendum, received an overwhelming vote of non-confidence from Labour
MPs. The pressure on him to resign is building.

So
that’s where politics stand in Merrie Olde England, barely a week after
the historic referendum on Europe. The final vote by a narrow 52-48
margin was to “leave” the EU, but there is increasing doubt about when
this will take effect.

There are two reasons why Britain's exit may never happen:

The idea of a 50-per-cent-plus-one referendum
deciding such colossal issues in the life of a nation is increasingly
being discredited.

It will
likely take another election to even begin to restore the credibility of
the Britain’s floundering and self-absorbed political and media elites.

Buyer's remorse is settling in:

Already, in terms of an economic backlash,
there are signs that the biggest losers will be many of the working
class people who voted to leave.

In the
days since the vote, there has also been more criticism about the
referendum process. On an issue with such historic meaning — in this
case possibly the dissolution of both the United Kingdom and the
European Union — why would the government allow the margin of victory to
be as tight as 50 per cent plus one?

On the morning after, the haze sometimes disappears.

On another note, Elie Wiesel died yesterday. He was a witness to the evil of which man is capable. The opposite of good, he wrote, is indifference. Words to remember in times such as these.

Saturday, July 02, 2016

In his speech to Parliament on Wednesday, Barack Obama called for a version of globalization where the benefits accrued to all, not just the top one percent. A consummation devoutly to be wished. But, Tom Walkom writes, it may be too late to make it happen:

Indeed, the best Obama could come up with as a
model for humane globalization was the deeply flawed Trans-Pacific
Partnership trade and investment deal. Yet it is so unpopular in the
U.S. that even Hillary Clinton, Obama’s ally and presumptive Democratic
presidential nominee, has vowed to deep-six it.

The
TPP is unpopular for good reasons. Many Americans (and Canadians) don’t
want to lose their jobs to workers in low-wage Pacific Rim countries
like Vietnam.

Given their experience with the North American
Free Trade Agreement, Americans are justly suspicious of politicians
who promise that these losses will be more than compensated for by new
jobs at home.

And so they are fighting back
through antiglobalization politicians, such as Trump and would-be
Democratic presidential nominee Bernie Sanders.

Bucking the trend is nothing new:

In 19th century Canada, it found expression through John A. Macdonald’s National Policy of protective tariffs.

The
new Dominion of Canada was losing population as workers migrated to the
U.S. in search of jobs. Macdonald’s break from British free-trade
orthodoxy was designed to create the jobs that would keep them at home.

A few decades later, in the 1930s, governments
around the world used the power of the state to resist the logic of a
market capitalism that had depressed wages, prices and jobs.

In some countries, notably Germany and Italy, this resistance was commandeered by racists and fascists.

In
others, it was not. U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New
Deal, a direct challenge to the prevailing economic orthodoxy, led not
to fascism but to projects such as the Tennessee Valley Authority
electrification scheme.

Canadian Prime Minister R.B. Bennett’s New Deal, while not quite as bold, led to the CBC.

During
the ’40s and ’50s, the battleground moved to the shop floor as North
America’s new industrial unions challenged an orthodoxy that said only
markets could determine wage rates. All of which is to say that this
tension over the market economy never goes away.

And so, once again, we find ourselves in a place where governments -- the latest being the UK's -- are rejecting the conventional wisdom of the day. On Wednesday, Obama spoke in support of the conventional wisdom. But, in spite of the good will he generated on Parliament Hill this week, the train may have already left the station.

About Me

A retired English teacher, I now write about public policy and, occasionally, personal experience. I leave it to the reader to determine if I practice what I preached to my students for thirty-two years.